Before the polls swarmed everything like a cold, unfair sea, with unconfirmed tragedies, deals, betrayals, greed, and truth crowding out want and sometimes reason, the scene was the same as it always is. Look back in the rearview mirror. Perhaps one glimpse shows the child you once were, guiding him by the hand, and the chance to feel the start of a summer once more, as in that old poem.
Children always grasp certain simple truths. One of them is that the sea belongs to them from late June to early September, and they chase it with a bucket, aiming to drop nearly a hundred little imprints into the sand. The essential tools of happiness are easy to reach, never far from reach or heart.
The birth of summer carries a promise of happiness. In the opening lines of Antonio Soler’s novel El camino de los ingleses, he writes that a summer lies at the center of our lives, then adds that the days fall upon us like tired trees. And it feels just like that. From now until September, the days will descend as tired trees, as stones in water, as that soft, fading light at sunset. And then everything becomes memory, crystallized by time.
There is a summer imagined in the mind, at its very start, a summer that lands on the long road of white sand as a heavy day rising toward shore. It is a summer of stillness and purpose, like a bull resting on a plain, a dog waiting in the shade of a well, a vase filled with daisies. A bronze summer that carries the sound of a cistern. It is a summer seen through the ordinary rites of childhood: the first day of school when a parent guides a child to new canvas shoes and bids farewell to the worn brown “gorillas” of winter. It is a light-sweet season when the first figs appear, when arithmetic on the chalkboard marks a new chapter. The summer begins with the hush of a walrus and is later broken by the inevitable end. That year crosses San Juan with a temperature that takes the breath away. The solstice marks a stretch of immortal afternoons and the final days of lessons. There is marble cool at the back, a quiet shade at the portal, a time for games, laughter, bare feet, and friends, and the lingering sense of things unseen that nonetheless shape those who are listening to life as it unfolds.
If such a summer has not visited you, at least hold it in memory. At the very center of a life there remains a summer. Perhaps this one is it. Observe the moment of arrival, and let it settle in like sunlight after a long day.